


Spinning A Loser

by Britpacker



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: British Politics, Episode Related, Established Relationship, F/M, Media Management, Spin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 01:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The leadership’s resolved, but there’s another crisis blowing up in the Party’s face.  Thanks goodness the Nutters didn’t leave their own media managers in charge!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spinning A Loser

**Author's Note:**

> It always struck me as odd that Ben Swain kept his job after his run-in with the cleaning lady. Perhaps somebody we know had a hand in drawing the sting from the scandal, while still making sure to keep the twerp in his place?
> 
> Set immediately after “Spinners And Losers”

He burst into the lobby of Party HQ on a gust of cold air and hot indignation, already yelling into his Blackberry. “Sam! Look, sorry to call you so early but I need you to get things started for me, OK? The _Mail’s_ running a story about Ben Swain abusing a cleaner – calling him a racist when he’s just a run-of-the-mill fucking tosser. Get Frankie and Ed onto it right now, yeah? I’m just going into a meeting – back ASAFP…”

“Malcolm, good of you to come over.” Tom Davis, soon-to-be Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland bared his teeth in what (apparently) was a jovial smile as he hurried from the main conference room to grip the newcomer’s hand. “Coffee?”

“Thanks. Sam, hang on a minute, OK?” Preferably, Malcolm considered as he accepted a cup, scalding hot and in a jug to be poured down the pants of that bastard Harrison whose departure from the Highest Office had catapulted this Nutter nonentity into the hot seat. It didn’t take a good PR man – still less the best – to realise the Party’s new, unopposed leader was electoral rabies.

Still, Malcolm Tucker had not reached his current – slightly perilous – position without learning to compromise. If the Party told him Tom Davis was its choice for leader then he would obey the Party’s will and do whatever might be in his power to make the Grade II Listed prick look Prime Ministerial.

If he was given the chance. It wasn’t as if the Nutters didn’t have their own (not very impressive, or they’d be sliding into seats around the breakfast table not him) press advisers currently sulking in the nearest fucking Starbucks.

Around a large rectangular table the Nutter elite were gathered with the few opponents they knew they couldn’t spray-paint with human shit just yet: Fatty, the doyen of the Old Party, who just happened to know the location of almost as many bodies as Malcolm himself; Dan Miller – not, perhaps, a Nutter, nor yet a Nutter enemy, but a man whose ambition meant “inside the tent” should be prefixed by the phrase “loaded with chains and” for Tom’s personal safety. And, Tucker supposed, himself.

indispensable. Hopefully. 

“Please, don’t let us interrupt if you’re busy.” Oh yes, Tom knew he needed him, but if that was his best _friendly_ face they were already fucked for the next election. “Is everything….”

“Sorry, sorry, this won’t take a minute. Sam?”

His P.A’s voice came soothingly down the line. “What do you want them to do, Malcolm?”

“Get the rest of the DoSAC cleaners in. Check with the Commons staff. Constituency offices – the lot. If we can make him look like a prick we should be OK, got that? It’s the racism we’ve got to worry about. Any problems, call me, right? Bye.”

“Crisis, Malcolm?” Fatty might have passed his sell-by date in 1983 but he was, in the current circumstances, almost an ally. Slipping into the vacant seat on the gigantic fucker’s left, Tucker grimaced.

“Bitch-fight at Richmond Terrace. Blinky got into a slanging match with a black cleaner and somebody’s sold it to the hacks as racially motivated abuse.”

“Fuck.” Fatty wasn’t often as succinct, or as sensible. “Tom, I know you weren’t planning a major reshuffle but a junior minster’s dispensable if…”

“Let’s not panic just yet; I suspect Malcolm has something up his sleeve.” Dan Miller smirked unconvincingly at him. Malcolm tried his best _who, me?_ look.

“It’s the racism we’ve got to get on top of and the best way to do that – and I’m fucking sorry in advance for saying this, it’s gonna to sound offensive – is to prove he’s just a prick. People expect their politicians to be twats but they won’t stand for racism, it’s worse than being sexist, or homophobic, or even Christian. If we can prove he’s as much of a tit with white cleaners as he is with the black ones he mightn’t even have to resign. And of course, none of the negative stuff will’ve come from us….”

“You’re right that _is_ offensive, but I’m sure you know what you’re talking about.” Tom fidgeted in his seat at the head of the table and shuffled the loose sheaf of papers before him. “But – forgive me, I thought the aim was to _save_ Ben?”

“That’s the other side of the strategy.” They were listening intently, all of them leaning over the table like students eager not to miss a pearl of their tutor’s wisdom. Just the way, Malcolm thought grimly, it should be. “We fix Elizabeth - Mrs Kipruto - up an interview with another paper – the _Express_ , that’ll get right on the _Mail’s_ tits. She talks about how she’s never been spoken to like that in all the years she’s been cleaning government offices – mentions how disgusted the witnesses were, how nice everybody was to her, what a shock it was to be spoken to like that by anyone in Richmond fucking happy-shiny Terrace. Ben offers an unreserved apology, sends her some flowers, all that soapy magazine tit wank shite… humble pie always goes down well with the electorate.”

“You’re certain this woman will…”

“Leave the lady to me, Tom. She even votes for us, for fuck’s sake, _and_ she’s prepared to say so.”

Their relived exhales hit him like a force ten gale. Nothing frightened a roomful of career politicians more than the prospect of facing their public.

Not much scared their media strategist like the prospect of letting these tossers out in the presence of what might loosely be termed _real people_.

“She wants to sound off like a fuckin’ foghorn but once she’s done, she’ll be happy. Couple of days and it’ll all blow over.”

“You’ll draft the apology?” It was almost a plea from G.B. & N I.’s next P.M. What followed was an unmistakable grovel.

“And I, ah, wanted to thank you for your help overnight, by the way. If you can kill this Ben story as efficiently as you seem to have flattened certain others….”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I’m here for, polishin’ up the Party.” The acknowledgement was still frosted with suspicion but Davis wagged his head energetically and his cohorts around the table visibly relaxed. 

“I’d rather not start with a reshuffle – not a big one, anyway – so if you _can_ salvage Ben for me… I was thinking of giving him Abbot’s job, but perhaps….”

“Hughie’s all right. Ineffectual but harmless.”

“Your favourite kind of minister, Malcolm.”

Fatty’s multiple chins wobbled with delight at his own joke. Tom looked blank. Malcolm only hoped they couldn’t hear the grind of his teeth.

“I’d like quiet and competent better, but I’ll take plain fuckin’ quiet at a push. I’ll do my best with Ben, but you’re not gonna like the headlines for the next couple of days even if things play out well.” 

They were waiting for more. Rabbits out of hats? “You’d agree a major reshuffle’s a bad idea?” Dan hinted.

“Of course it is, unless you want to tell the electorate “Hello, I’m Tom Davis and I have no fucking confidence in my colleagues.” And by the way, even if you _don’t_ have any confidence in them, don’t let people _think_ you’ve got no fucking confidence in them. Changing leaders mid-term’s risky enough, but if you throw out half the fuckin’ Cabinet at the same time…”

They nodded like a whole crew of Wise Monkeys: now if only they could get Fatty to Speak No, and Davis to lose his tendency to Think Plenty evil they might almost look like a convincing Cabinet team, especially in light of how fucking hopeless the Opposition (fortunately) appeared. If he had a tough job in making this lot look like government ministers, not a casting director’s rejects for the remake of _Yes, Prime Minister_ , poor old Stewie Pearson had the twats that didn’t even make the first audition to work with.

Even so, as the debate meandered like a Highland stream Malcolm Tucker found himself yearning for the good old days, when the Party had a purpose beyond keeping these tits off the dole. He pulled a notepad from his briefcase and began scratching earnestly, not at the notes his neighbours assumed but at the kind of grotesque caricatures, all popping eyes and outlandish cocks, that had almost got him thrown out of Mister Moffett’s art class back in the day.

It kept him better entertained than Tom’s toneless droning until the Blackberry in his pocket began to blare.

“Excuse me, Tom: I’d better take this.”

“Of course.”

His chair squeaked furiously when he shoved it away, rising to pace as he answered her call. “Sam, what’ve you got for me?”

He listened intently, aware of them on the periphery of his vision; all staring, mouths hanging open, rapt as rabbits in the light of an oncoming truck. “OK, that’s good, is he prepared to go public? Calling a constituency worker an arsehole, yeah, that’s the kind of thing we want. Oh, he is, is he? Well, tell him it’s all for his own fucking benefit and he can thank me later, right?”

Her laughter as he cut the line made his heart lurch. Even when the world was falling apart around him, there was always Sam.

“Er, Malcolm, if you’re needed in the office I can pop in later?” In one respect if no other, Tom Davis had the edge over his successor. Nick Harrison never assumed what his chief enforcer was doing might be more important than what he was saying to the man, even when a nuclear holocaust of shit was exploding all over the fucking press.

“Give me a call when you’re free,” he suggested, more amiably than he had intended. Tom might be practically autistic in company – and that was being polite about it – but at least he knew what he needed.

A fucking good PR man to make his bunch of tossers, charlatans and dribblers presentable.

He stuffed the defaced notebook back into his briefcase, shook hands all round (and carefully wiped his palm against his trouser leg as soon as he was out of the room) and headed back toward Downing Street in high spirits.

In spite of everything, today wasn’t looking totally fucking disastrous.

*

“Christ, he comes across as a prize prick.” The morning papers were spread across the bed and while the headlines looked unpleasant the thrust of the articles themselves was all that Malcolm could have hoped. “Nobody’s suggesting he’s a racist, though.”

“That’s a result for us.” He stretched languorously, making the broadsheets flutter and much of his naked flank rub against hers. “When the _Express_ runs the interview tomorrow and Ben does his _fulsome apology_ shit we’ll be home and dry. Not that the ignorant cunt deserves it, but we’ve probably saved his fucking career.”

Sam Cassidy pushed her long brown hair off her face and shifted onto her hip, giving her lover – never her boss, in this room at least – a long look that achieved the impossible and actually made Malcolm Tucker fidget. “What?” he asked indignantly.

“Is this what we’ve come to, Malcolm? Accepting that our M.P’s are all ignorant pricks who treat the electorate – their employers, for Christ’s sake – with contempt? Don’t you think that’s _sad?_ ”

“It’s fuckin’ sad love, but we can only work with what we’ve got and it takes a certain type to go into politics these days.” Once, perhaps, he had been an idealist about people, imagining they all got involved with the Party for the right reasons. 

He’d been much younger then. 

As she was now. 

Pushing the papers aside he ghosted a fingertip down the velvety curve of her cheek, savouring the softness as she arched into his touch. Her lips puckered up, deep chocolate eyes drifting shut. Practically commanding him to kiss her.

Still bemused by his good fortune, Malcolm obliged. By the time they parted every page of the daily rags had slithered off to form a messy paper ring around their king-size bed, but the sadness that had been clouding her eyes was gone.

“He told me to piss off once.”

Every muscle, previously so relaxed, began to clench with tension. His eyes frosted over, their clear grey depths suddenly cold enough to freeze lava. “Swain?” he grated.

Sam nodded. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Honestly Malcolm, I’m tougher than that; and anyway we weren’t together when it happened.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not having some loud-mouthed prick with a defective fuckin’ optic nerve being rude to my P.A! You should’ve told me.”

“And what would you have done – once you’d finished tearing off his useless testicles and dismembering him with your bare fucking hands?”

“At the time? Probably shunted the fucker off past the back benches and out to join that cunt Holhurst by the fucking bins. Yesterday morning? I’d have let the fuckin’ press flay him alive and I’d have moved my chair out into the fucking street to watch.”

“And that, my sexy Scottish wildcat, is exactly why I didn’t tell you.” He bristled at the nickname, unconvinced this lovely, sweet natured girl could seriously apply that adjective to him. “I’m not having a man’s career wrecked – and potentially a by-election called – because he was stupid enough to be offhand once, a long time ago, to me.”

That generosity of spirit startled him every time but Malcolm couldn’t complain; it was one of the many things that had drawn him to his indispensable assistant as more than a mere Westminster helpmeet. “If it’d been the other way around…”

“He’d not be satisfied until he had me swinging in chains from the nearest lamp post. I know.” Gently she smoothed the furrows from his brow, sliding her fingertips up into his thick grey hair. “But he’s a politician, and as we’ve just been saying they’re a bunch of precious, self-absorbed pricks.”

“True. Very true.” Even he couldn’t stay angry: not with her fingers running through his hair and sending tingles through his sensitive scalp, the impulses being boosted by his brain and shot south at the speed of a putative HS2 train. “Are you trying to distract me, by the way?”

“Is it working?” She clambered over him, deliberately straddling his thighs, and a big, silly smile spread adorably over her smooth features. “Hmmm, yes I think it is, isn’t it?”

“Fuck, yes!” He was only human; a fact he’d not cared to remember before she moved from his office and into his bed, filling his sterile home with her daft trinkets, her tins of cocoa powder and her own unique, irresistible warmth. 

It felt fucking brilliant to be distracted again.


End file.
